Tuesday, March 15, 2011

She feels the contours of the word with her tongue, tracing its outline. It is smooth, oval like a river stone and tastes poisonous. The sensation fills her mouth and slides down her throat into the cavity where she creates feelings of love and hate and fear. She trembles like a bee with wet wings drawn towards absence and evolves the courage to say the word out loud. "Hippopotomonstrosesquipedalian," she announces.

Framed Excerpts

Bio.

I am the literary voice whose sobriquet is synonymous with pseudonym. I exist only through the benevolence of language. As Ferdinand de Saussure once said to me while I was reading a telegram from Descartes: "Anonymous Author, no word is inherently meaningful. Rather a word is only a 'signifier,' or the representation of something, and it must be combined in the brain with the 'signified,' or the thing itself, in order to form a meaning-imbued 'sign.' In dismantling 'signs' we come to an empirical understanding of how humans synthesize physical stimuli into words and other abstract concepts." I agree. My interests include synesthesia and its close association with competitive pig-calling. My favourite colour is the shade of taupe that signifies the high tide mark in a well-used bathtub.